Portside

' No accommodation to racism' in 1905. Smoking causes lung cancer in 1957. Nixon on tape, really? in 1973. FBI admits to burglaries in 1975. CIA admits to more bad behavior in 1977. Forgetting about the Civil War 1917. One last nuke test in 1962.

"The FBI's systematic misuse of these resources proves that it (and the rest of the federal government) simply can't be trusted to wield this sort of power," said one campaigner. "Let 702 die."

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Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.

A just-unsealed file shows that the FBI extensively tracked Aretha Franklin’s civil rights activism, particularly her friendships with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Angela Davis.

The FBI had played its role as the “political police of the national government,” Noam Chomsky wrote and the government maintained to the bitter end that it had a right to undermine an organization just because of its ideas.

Six months after the FBI issued a report inventing from whole cloth the term Black Identity Extremists — claiming this group poses a terrorist threat to police — the first apparent case of the prosecution of a BIE has emerged. The BIE designation has created concern in the Black community that the FBI is launching a new COINTELPRO program targeting Black activists who have committed no crimes, with more arrests and prosecutions of those involved in racial justice movements to follow.

Pete Seeger, folk singer and activist for peace, civil rights, labor rights and the environment, left us just two years ago - January 27, 2014. Recently, Seeger's FBI file has been released. Included in the file is Pete's correspondence with Victor Grossman. The Editors of The Volunteer, founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, asked Grossman if he had any recollections of Pete's visit to East Berlin in 1967. Here's his story.